Spell unbroken

Harry Potter fever returns in anticipation of latest book, film

Now 20 and a hard-core Harry Potter fan, Tiffani Sandoval started reading Harry in fifth grade. She has even turned her Marine boyfriend into a Harry Potter fan. <em> NELVIN C. CEPEDA / Union-Tribune</em>

They're still wild about Harry – 10 years, seven books, five films and $17 billion later.

The Harry Potter phenomenon transformed the lives of reluctant readers, introduced the concept of the midnight launch party at bookstores and proved that an English author could go from welfare case to billionaire by capturing the imagination of millions everywhere.

Stop by a Borders Books and Music store late Wednesday night and see for yourself, as fans line up to buy J.K. Rowling's latest creation, “Tales of Beedle the Bard,” fairy tales mentioned in the concluding volume, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” published last year. (Net proceeds will go to one of her favorite charities.)

Check out the audience reaction to the trailer for “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” playing ahead of the “Twilight” vampire romance.

Or download hour-long podcasts from MuggleNet and Leaky Cauldron, the two leading Potter Web sites.

With 400 million-plus copies of the Potter books in print, three more movies to go (to add to the $4.5 billion in box office so far) and the entire Potter franchise valued at $17 billion, that's a lot of wizard gold sitting in Gringotts Bank.

The question is whether Harry will keep the allegiance of his aging fans or lose them to “Hannah Montana,” “Supernatural” and other pop fads of the moment.

Stephen Potts asked his children's literature classes at the University of California San Diego and San Diego State University to raise their hands if they were still Harry Potter fans, and only a few fessed up to their undying fascination with Hogwarts, Quidditch and Lord Voldemort.

“For a lot of people who grew up with it, they're afraid to admit to a vice they had in junior high – even though it's OK,” Potts said.

(He admits to a 40-year “vice” of devotion to J.R.R. Tolkien and his “Lord of the Rings.” He wrote an original story while in college in the 1960s and displays a fading poster of Middle Earth in his Warren Literature Building office at UCSD. He offers an LOTR course every two years.)

But three of his students, two from California and the other from China, agreed to talk about their love for Harry and where their affair stands years later.

Tiffani Sandoval, 20, from Ventura County and majoring in human development, said she first came upon Harry Potter in fifth grade, soon after the first of the series, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone,” was released in the U.S. in 1998. She had favored historical fiction and “American Girl” books, rather than fantasy. “The first chapter was horrendously disgusting to get through,” she recalled, but she finished the 309-page book over the next month and collected the six sequels as they appeared over the next nine years. “I was definitely a bigger reader when Harry Potter came out and read everything I could get my hands on.”

She took in the movies as they began appearing in 2001, surfed Potter Web sites and collected Potter souvenirs – down to the green and silver tie favored by the Slytherins, Harry's least favorite classmates at Hogwarts.